In a literary blog and, later, in an online comic series, we have conceived a fictional town that took the shape of an ever-shifting, constantly evolving and expanding tent camp. While the initial idea had come as a half-conscious impulse, it was only after that we realized the proper nature of its relationship to our imagination. The places and inhabitants of the tent camp appeared to be those that we instinctively missed in our “tangible” reality and thus had to plant in an imaginary setting. The tent camp as we envisioned it was, then, a place we’d like to live in (or at least drop by once in a while), and the characters creating its situations – its very psychic and physical architecture – were the people we’d like to find ourselves around. “Whenever we stumble upon a sphere that we don’t quite know how to deal with, we establish a tent camp there” – that was our simplified justification for such an initiative.

Further experience, however, revealed that it wasn’t all that simple. First of all, some of the places and inhabitants of the town came from the real life, albeit in a mutated, fictionalized form. Beginning to live a life of its own, the tent camp as a fantasy then started to re-inscribe itself into the real world. People, buildings and nature sites that served as models for their counterparts in the tent camp’s fictional universe were no more what they had been before; something happened to them, although they themselves might have never noticed it. It almost comes to a point where, like in the South Park episode Imaginationland, things that take place on the imaginary plane have a direct effect on the reality at hand. Our tent camp is something more than just a complementary, secondary fictional entity; it is rather a mirror world that reveals more about the real world than the latter does itself.

The question we ask ourselves is this: how do we unfold this mirror world and transpose it onto real people, buildings and spaces in a way that will enable everyone, not just us as authors, to access it? How do we bring to the surface the “grain of fiction” in them that instantly inspires narratives, the “narrative ready-made” – for instance, utterances, texts and images that seem to say something completely different from what they were meant to say, and thus act as an opening to their own fictional universe? How do we endow physical structures with a layer of fiction that originates in these structure themselves and then goes on to rearrange them in our mind’s eye?

A place one’d like to live in, people one’d like to be around

Jurij Dobriakov and Tomas Čiučelis

In a literary blog and, later, in an online comic series, we have conceived a fictional town that took the shape of an ever-shifting, constantly evolving and expanding tent camp. While the initial idea had come as a half-conscious impulse, it was only after that we realized the proper nature of its relationship to our imagination. The places and inhabitants of the tent camp appeared to be those that we instinctively missed in our “tangible” reality and thus had to plant in an imaginary setting. The tent camp as we envisioned it was, then, a place we’d like to live in (or at least drop by once in a while), and the characters creating its situations – its very psychic and physical architecture – were the people we’d like to find ourselves around. “Whenever we stumble upon a sphere that we don’t quite know how to deal with, we establish a tent camp there” – that was our simplified justification for such an initiative.

Further experience, however, revealed that it wasn’t all that simple. First of all, some of the places and inhabitants of the town came from the real life, albeit in a mutated, fictionalized form. Beginning to live a life of its own, the tent camp as a fantasy then started to re-inscribe itself into the real world. People, buildings and nature sites that served as models for their counterparts in the tent camp’s fictional universe were no more what they had been before; something happened to them, although they themselves might have never noticed it. It almost comes to a point where, like in the South Park episode Imaginationland, things that take place on the imaginary plane have a direct effect on the reality at hand. Our tent camp is something more than just a complementary, secondary fictional entity; it is rather a mirror world that reveals more about the real world than the latter does itself.

The question we ask ourselves is this: how do we unfold this mirror world and transpose it onto real people, buildings and spaces in a way that will enable everyone, not just us as authors, to access it? How do we bring to the surface the “grain of fiction” in them that instantly inspires narratives, the “narrative ready-made” – for instance, utterances, texts and images that seem to say something completely different from what they were meant to say, and thus act as an opening to their own fictional universe? How do we endow physical structures with a layer of fiction that originates in these structure themselves and then goes on to rearrange them in our mind’s eye?